The rapid growth in wireless communications services, such as broadband Internet access and streaming media applications, leads to an increasing demand for higher data rates. Advancements in multiplexing schemes, such as Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) and Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA), are important for next generation wireless communications systems. This is due to the fact that such schemes can provide many advantages including modulation efficiency, spectrum efficiency, flexibility (e.g., allowing differentiated quality of service), and strong multi-path immunity over conventional single carrier modulation schemes.
One example of a communication system based on an orthogonal multiplexing scheme is a WiMAX system. WiMAX, which stands for the Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access, is a standards-based broadband wireless technology that provides high-throughput broadband connections over long distances.
In the WiMAX communication protocol, Base stations will update the MAC management messages periodically. Each MAC management message has a set of fields plus a set of TLV (TLV is a tuple of Type, Length, and Value), and TLVs can (recursively) contain other TLV. The value of some TLVs is consumed by a list of modules inside the mobile device protocol stack. Since the appearance of TLV is variable and unpredictable and the order of these TLVs can be out of sequence, the decoding of TLVs is time consuming and the distribution of the TLVs values to the related modules become latency intensive. As a result, mobile device microprocessor without interlocked pipeline stages (MIPS) consumption may increase and delay processing time, which may ultimately result in the information needed by each module becoming out of sync and causing a crash of the protocol stack.